Sources & Extracts

Review this excerpt and then use the BACK key in your browser to return to the page you were on.

Dee is a libertarian who believes that individuals have natural rights. These rights are the basis of her views on what governments and private parties can do to people, including what restrictions on speech they may establish. The natural rights tradition is well established in moral philosophy. Like the utilitarian tradition, it involves many standard issues and problems. Samuel Scheffler makes the following comment:
Contemporary philosophers who choose to work within the natural rights tradition need to explicate their use of natural rights terminology. Given the metaphysical associations of the tradition, such philosophers must explain what they mean by assigning rights to people. They must, further, say something about the source of these rights, and they must deal with a variety of epistemic questions. How do we know what rights people have? What sorts of evidence justify us in believing that people do have certain rights but do not have certain others?

In the same paper, Scheffler goes on to indicate what he means when he speak of natural rights. His definition may be useful to consider:

…I shall understand the assertion that a person has a natural right to X to mean that that person has a natural prima facie justified claim to X. The term "prima facie" is used to indicate that such claims are overridable, but I understand them to be overridable only in extreme circumstances. The force of the word "natural" is to express the idea that in order to have such a right, it is sufficient for a person to possess certain natural attributes. The possession of natural rights is thus in no way dependent upon the existence of a legal system or any other social artifact.
Reference: Samuel Scheffler "Natural Rights, Equality, and the Minimal State," Canadian Journal of Philosophy, March,1976. Scheffler's paper was reprinted in Reading Nozick, Edited by Jeffrey Paul.